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TIL From 1898 to 2006 Americans paid a 3% tax on all long distance telephone calls in order to pay for the Spanish American War.

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XWD8 TIL the Large Hadron Collider had to be shutdown when a weasel fell into it.
8aoKa TIL Microsoft's iconic Solitaire game for Windows was developed in 1988 by then intern Wes Cherry out of boredom. He received no royalties.
e0w46 TIL of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's lyricist, who wrote Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte. An ordained priest, he was banished from Venice for living in a brothel, narrowly avoided execution in the French Revolution, and wound up running a grocery store in Sunbury, Pennsylvania.
nevvb TIL Two thousand and ten years ago, Roman Emperor Augustus banished Ovid to the island of Tomis, where he stayed for the rest of his life. Rome's city council formally revoked his banishment in December 2017
9YBDM TIL about the Great Stink, where after years of untreated human waste and industrial runoff in the River Thames, the smell became unbearable in London during the summer of 1858. The stench finally caused local and national authorities to address the problem—and also ended outbreaks of cholera.